Switching to the Z shell
I’ve recently switched to Zsh from BASH. I switched after Cookie had demonstrated it for me — I immediately saw one great feature: Zsh can handle a prompt on the right-hand side of the screen. The prompt is managed intelligently by Zsh, so that it temporarily removed if it gets in the way. I use my right prompt to show the current working-directory. When I’m working in a deeply-nested directory, this string can get quite long and take up much of the line-width. Before using Zsh, I also had my working-directory on the right of the line. But this was done by an ugly hack, as BASH doesn’t support such a prompt. The result was that my display would become garbled if I overwrote some of the right prompt. It was a mess!
The switch was done without any problems. I had to move the contents of my
~/.bash* files into the corresponding ~/.zsh* files — no problem.
But I’ve also gone a step further and I’m now using the powerful
completion-features of Zsh. I’ve added these two
lines to my ~/.zshrc:
autoload -U compinit compinit
This initializes the completion-code which makes
Zsh much more intelligent. Instead of always
suggesting all files in the current directory, I’ll now only see
directories after cd, manual-pages after man, compressed files after
gunzip, and so on. It also knows about the valid options for a lot of
programs like cvs, dvips, etc. All this only slows things down a
little bit, thanks to Zshs ability to load the
code automatically when needed. So it’s only when I try to complete an
option to cvs that Zsh actually loads the
necessary code.
So — Zsh is a great shell. Compared to other
shells (well, compared to BASH) I
think it’s much more advanced. I always thought that man bash was big,
but that’s only until you try man zsh. That tells you that the manual
has been split out into 11 different sections because of the many features
:-) And each of these sections is rather big by itself…
John:
How is the Z shell working? Still using it?
19 February 2010, 8:08 pm